


space luge is also cancelled (and all other events are pending)

by Anonymous



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, On the Run, Post-Book One, abandoned moon bases
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:02:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25652539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "Nav," said Harrow, "shut up about the moons."
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 22
Kudos: 160
Collections: Anonymous





	space luge is also cancelled (and all other events are pending)

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts folder since March--I figured I'd post it before the new book comes out and I don't have to try to work in new canon compliance.

"Well," said Gideon, "shit. Didn't the emperor teach you how to fly ships?"

"We were being pursued." There was a look on Harrow's face as she climbed from the wreckage that said, basically, that she couldn't believed she'd bailed on her comfy Lyctorhood to rescue Gideon's ass. Gideon couldn't really believe it either. She'd technically been in Harrow's head for half of it, and the other half she'd been barely conscious on a small planet that was hugely hot--so hot, in fact, she'd thought her predictions had come true and that she had been shot into the sun--but she'd also seriously considered that maybe Hell was real after all, and there she was, in it. "By trained combat pilots."

"Maybe you should have stolen a better ship," said Gideon, "and learned to fly it. That way we wouldn't have crashed into a moon."

Harrow closed her eyes and the echo of their psycho psychic Lyctor bond told Gideon that she was giving Harrow a headache, but it wasn't Gideon who was going to be suffering from this moon shit. At least the moon of the First had been atmospherized. From what Gideon remembered, the Second and the Eighth hadn't bothered with terraforming their moons, and the Ninth's moon was even smaller and colder and rockier than the Ninth itself, judged so useless that the Empire had decided to drag a station all the way out to the edges of the system because the moon wouldn't even cut it as a penal colony. For the most part, moons didn't have much in the way of thanergic energy. Not a lot of death, although the moons of the Third were the Third, and if they'd crash-landed there, there'd be plenty of death energy, and maybe Coronabeth, scantily-clad--

"Nav," said Harrow, "shut up about the moons."

And then there was that. She hadn't even been talking. "Why? This one-sixth g is doing great things for my tits." Gideon bounced, experimentally. 

Because if they were talking about the moons, or Gideon's tits, they weren't talking about the giant fossilized pachyderm in the room, which was: Harrow had been born from the death of two hundred children, to bring glory to the Ninth. Harrow had nearly killed herself, and Gideon had actually killed herself, to bring glory to the Ninth. To be one of the two new Lyctors, to help keep peace in an expanding Empire. And Harrow had essentially spit on her destiny and shoved it out an airlock when she'd learned that Gideon was still alive.

It was massively stupid, but also, in a way, incredibly romantic. And a little creepy. Well, a lot creepy, but Harrowhawk had set a pretty high baseline for creep. Grave robbing was, for Harrow, slightly more enthusiastic than normal.

"Hey," said Gideon, "do you think the Cohort's going to follow us down here? Because I've always wanted to fight in low g--"

"Shut up, Griddle." Harrow's mouth was pinched, her eyes closed. There were worry lines on her forehead, and she was barely twenty. Gideon kind of wanted to smooth them away, but that would end up with paint all over her fingers or Harrow biting her hand off. "There's an abandoned colony in this direction. We should be able to find another ship there."

"How do you know--" She sensed it then: people had died in that direction, over a period of time. Maybe a few hundred at most. There'd been a couple of gnarly accidents that accounted for fifty of them, but the rest had simply passed away of old age, or disease, or some weird freaky sex shit. "Oh. Tomb, sweet tomb."

Harrow set her shoulders and stalked off towards the comforting echo of death. Even with the springy leaps into the air, she managed to storm off in high dudgeon, Gideon had to give her that. God, she'd missed her.

Gideon waited long enough to make it clear that she wasn't following, and then bounced along afterwards. "Look," she said, after she'd gotten tired of bouncing and watching herself bounce, "it really was very nice of you to storm the Sixth and carry me out of there and then wake me from my coma, okay? I'm not shitting on your intentions. I'm just saying you could have done a little more research."

There was a flash of anger at that. "And what research would the Sixth have done in that time?"

"Uh."

"They healed you to see why you didn't die," said Harrow. Her fists were clenched, bone bracelets jingling. "What if they accidentally killed you, Nav?"

"You'd be stuck with my spirit ass forever?"

"I already am," Harrow pointed out, whirling around, "and--"

The hairs on the back of Gideon's neck rose up. That was all the warning she had before there was the whine of an airship behind them and Harrow fucking whirled and tossed a handful of bone chips into the air.

It turned out low gravity was good for more than just Gideon's tits, because those bones went way further up than Harrow could have normally thrown them with her noodly little arms, forming skeletons about to attack the ship that had found them.

The ship fired on the skeletons. The first blast hit the skeletons and shattered them.

Mid-air, the skeletons reformed, only this time, instead of being half a dozen, there was easily a hundred. Not all of them made it to the ship that was pursuing them, but then again, they didn't all need to. Thirty or so were enough to bring it crashing down into the moondust, and Gideon could feel Harrow feeling the pilot die.

"Okay." It was one thing to call Harrow creepy and ghoulish and a tiny psychopath, and it was another to feel the ripple of pleasure she took in that death. "I'm guessing that was good for you too."

"There's not enough thanergy on this moon," said Harrow, mouth thin beneath the paint.

The thing was, though, that maybe, when they were still kids, a handful of skeletons would have posed a problem for Harrow. And the shift into a hundred would have made her break out into at least a little blood sweat, and that was on a planet. On a moon--

"Hang on," said Gideon. "You're a Lyctor. You're your own battery." Technically, Gideon was supposed to be Harrow's battery. One flesh, one end turned out to be a lot less romantic than it'd sounded when she'd first said the words to Harrow. "I mean, the Emperor's Lyctors can Lyctor it up in the middle of space. Why are you so angry about how few people died on this moon?"

"I can use myself--"

"Phrasing," said Gideon, delighted.

"--but it's preferable to have a wellspring to draw on."

Harrow was like her grease-hoarding great aunts, realized Gideon. She had bound her soul to someone who was eighty years old on the inside. She probably had a drawer full of scraps of lace she refused to get rid of.

Gideon loved her so much it hurt.

"Lead the way to the nearest graveyard, then," she said, "and hopefully the colony it came from will have a functional ship."

-

It did not.

If it wasn't for the atmosphere, Gideon would have guessed the moon colony they'd found was pre-Resurrection. It was old as balls. It was also shaped like balls ("they're geodesic domes," Harrow hissed at her) and clumped in a rough formation. The outsides of the geodesic balls were liberally covered with solar panels and they were still close enough to Dominicus for that to be a good idea.

Harrow had been masking their body heat from the Cohort sensors through necromancy, not that Gideon understood the theorem. It was deeply unfair that she'd taken a spike through the chest and Harrow had gotten all of her fighting knowledge but Gideon still didn't know shit about necromancy. Not that she wanted to sit through decades of Doctor Skeleton's Bones and More Bones, but it would have been a nice bonus to get the knowledge without any of the work.

On the other hand, bones were kind of gross. Death was kind of gross. Gideon had been dead, or however close to it she could get, and she hadn't liked it. Harrow could bone it up.

And bone it up she did. When they stopped outside the first ball, Harrow closed her eyes, jangled her bone bracelets, and Gideon could feel her getting all spooky. She didn't know exactly what Harrow was doing until she reached out--eyes still closed!--and typed in an access code on the keypad. 

"What the hell," said Gideon, as the door slid open. "Did the ghosts give you the password?"

"The ghosts didn't give me the password. I sensed the patterns of behavior from those who lived and are buried--"

"The ghosts gave you the password." They stepped inside, and into standard gravity. Gideon was going to miss the bouncing.

Harrow blew out a breath, reverting to the teenager Gideon had always known was underneath the face paint, bone corset, and black lace. "Yes. And a map of the settlement."

That was going to be handy, because inside the big ball were even more balls. Hydroponic gardens looped around the dim interior of the dome, and Gideon thought she could hear a rustle of animal movement in them, but she didn't see anything in the dim pathways that went from one big ball to the next.

"Greenhouses," said Harrow, pointing out one of the bigger balls. "Workshops. Mess hall. Living quarters." These last were the smallest balls of all.

Gideon's stomach gurgled. "You think there's any food in the mess hall?"

But Harrow actually led her to the greenhouse ball, and Gideon had to stop and stare. She'd grown up with the leek fields of the Ninth, and then spent a few weeks with the lush vegetation of the half-drowned First, and then been practically dead on the Sixth, where nothing grew. She'd never seen anything like the giant greenhouse. Plants were everywhere. All kinds of plants. She'd thought the gardens of Canaan House had run riot, but clearly she'd been wrong. "This place has been abandoned, though," she said. "For centuries."

"They didn't pull it down," said Harrow. There was a hive, an actual beehive, humming at the far end of the first greenhouse. Harrow began picking--berries, Gideon thought, fruits, things she'd only seen in magazines. She shoved them into her mouth. Everything was sweet, and ripe, and juicy. She followed Harrow over vines and overripe, sometimes to the point of rotting, things that had fallen to the floor, creating a sort of mulch that smelled better than most of the rations Gideon had ever squeezed out of a tube. Some of it was fermenting. It went straight to her head, and when she leaned forward and ate a handful of blackberries out of Harrow's hand and Harrow hissed out a tight breath, she didn't feel even a little shame.

"I was in a medically prolonged coma for six years," she reminded Harrow, "while they ran tests on me. I don't know what they fed me, but it was probably awful. I haven't tasted anything this good in forever."

But she caught an edge of--oh, shit. Harrow had liked Gideon eating out of her hand, and that filled Gideon with a bunch of feelings she was not prepared to deal with. Also, she hadn't masturbated in six years. Gideon bit back a whimper.

Harrow shrugged, still all bony shoulders, still looking profoundly uncomfortable. "It's understandable. But it's not enough to sustain us in the long term. We've got to find a way out of here, before the Cohort decide to storm the moon in force."

So they were done with the greenhouses (Gideon snagged more blackberries for later), and on their way to the giant ball that was the hanger.

As much as the pre-Resurrection crowd had built its solar panels and electricity systems to last, the same couldn't be said for its ships. Or, well, ship, because the colonists had left in the rest, and the one that remained behind was broken down, which was probably why it had remained behind. "Useless," said Harrow, elbow-deep in engine parts, and withdrew her arms in disgust.

"Are the ghosts teaching you about mechanics too?" asked Gideon. It was weird and spooky and cool. But what she got from Harrow was a memory flash of lessons in the Emperor's fleet. Apparently Harrow had been taught how to fix her ship but not how to fly it.

"That was evasive maneuvers," said Harrow, teeth gritted. "I don't have nearly as much experience as battle-tested lieutenants of the Second."

"Okay, okay," said Gideon, holding up her own hands which were stained purple from berry juice. "Maybe you can steal that dead Second back there and make her ghost teach you how to fly."

Harrow went still, considering. She thought it was a good idea.

"Perhaps later. We should go to the living quarters."

There were sonic sinks and showers in the living quarters. Harrow cleaned off her hands, Gideon cleaned off her hands, and then Harrow went straight to the bedrooms and started raiding closets.

"Uh," said Gideon, as Harrow carried off two suits and two pairs of boots, "why are we now going back to the greenhouses?"

"Because." Harrow took fistfuls of dirt and started packing them into one of the boots, and Gideon, figuring her necromancer knew what she was doing, also grabbed a boot and some dirt. 

They stuffed the boots full, and then Harrow took some chips of bone from her pocket and shoved one deep into every left boot.

"Oh," said Gideon, "I see. We're planting skeletons."

It was, she had to admit, rolling the legs of one of the suits over the boots, a pretty good idea, although not if the ships got close enough to look at them. But it'd still show up as movement away from the abandoned colony, footprints in the moon dust, and--

"Hey, by sending out a bunch of First dirt and plant matter out onto the moon, are we potentially upsetting the moon's ecosystem?"

The look Harrow shot her said she clearly couldn't care less, but Gideon thought that might be kind of cool. She wanted to come back in five years--that was, if the many people who were chasing them didn't catch and/or kill them first--and find some blackberries growing on the moon. Floating on the moon! She felt that after almost twenty years of snow leeks and lab protein she was owed some fruity miracles.

"You don't die, Gideon," said Harrow quietly. "Not by poison gas, not by having your thalergy drained, not by having a spike shoved through your heart. Those aren't miracles enough for you?"

Gideon dusted her hands off on her trousers. "Yeah, but they all tasted awful."

And that was why she got to lug all four boots to the door. Sure, there was probably some non-petty reason like Harrow didn't want to do any obvious necromancy under the dome in case the Cohort brought in a necromancer who could sense that kind of thing, but this was Nonagesimus. It backfired anyway, because this was the closest thing to a workout she'd gotten since the battle at Canaan House.

And then it struck her that Harrow thought that she, Gideon Nav, was a miracle, and she nearly tripped over her own feet. She almost missed the damn face paint because she knew, just knew, she was blushing, cheeks redder than her hair, and it was a relief to stick the boots and suit right outside the dome's door, and to keep her head down, embarrassment hopefully unseen, as Harrowhawk twitched her fingers and two skeletons grew into the suits, skulls popping out of the collars, bony hands reaching back to slip on their hoods, and then tramped off into the vast gray nothingness, steps growing lighter and longer in the low g.

"That should distract them for a day," said Harrow, and then she sort of swayed in place and Gideon was up in an instant, catching her under her back and knees.

"I thought the moon--"

"I've been awake for over a hundred standard hours," Harrow said. She did not tell Gideon to put her down. 

"Maybe you should sleep," said Gideon, and began carrying Harrow back towards the ball they'd stolen the boots from.

Harrow didn't agree with her, exactly, but she didn't disagree, and, more importantly, she let Gideon lug her back. Gideon's dirty magazines had always referred to this as a bridal carry, although in Gideon's dirty magazines no one accessorized with a human rib cage or used phalanges as earrings. She tried to remember if there had ever been sleep deprivation involved, but the plots tended to be as thin as the flim they were printed on, and anyway no one read those magazines for the plots.

As they went into the first living quarter, Harrow's paranoid mind once again disapproved that there weren't keypads everywhere. Something something this was how a society collapsed.

"Yeah," said Gideon, "what if the call was coming from inside the house?" But all that did was remind her of Canaan House, of the construct that got past a locked door and murdered Jeannemary in her sleep. The memory was sharp and sour.

Harrow put a hand on Gideon's arm. She didn't say, _It wasn't your fault_ , but Gideon heard it loud and clear. It didn't make Gideon feel absolved or anything, but it was nice that Harrow wanted to comfort her, she guessed. 

Gideon swallowed, and made her way past the gathering room, with its dusty chairs and tables. The first door she opened showed them a bedroom.

"Would you look at that," she said, "there's only one bed."

"There are eight bedrooms in this compartment," said Harrowhawk. She wasn't even looking, the cheat, but it wasn't like Gideon minded that her face was currently smushed against Gideon's shoulder. "With a total of twelve beds."

"You want to find a bigger bedroom?"

"No," said Harrow. She wanted to be on that bed now, Gideon could tell. More surprisingly, she wanted Gideon there. The moon was silent and creepy, and Gideon wouldn't have blamed anyone else for feeling weird about being there, but silent and creepy was Harrow's jam. Maybe she was more upset about there not being a bunch of death around than she was letting on.

Yeah, decided Gideon, after she'd deposited Harrow on the bed, pulled off her own shoes, and then was allowed to wrap herself around Harrow's back before Harrow tugged the thin, dusty blankets over them, Harrow was definitely spooked by the moon.

"No," said Harrow, and grabbed her hands. She was facing away in the gloom. "I've missed you."

"I was in your head half the time," said Gideon. Harrow had taken off her ribcage corset but she was still incredibly bony and she was a pain in the ass, or, more accurately, pelvis, to cuddle, but it felt right to have her there. Also, she still ran hot, and the moon was cold. The base might still be functional but they'd set their heating at levels lower than Drearburh's. No wonder everybody eventually left. "And you were usually telling me to shut up."

"You were saying things that you knew would get me to tell you to shut up," said Harrow. "And--you were dead. I thought. It hurt when you were there. It hurt when you weren't."

"Oh," said Gideon. The position reminded her of the minutes after what should have been her death: her arms around Harrow, holding her sword, guiding her. She'd been too busy fighting, and also being thrilled that it had worked, to really process all of it. Any of it. She'd thought she might still be there, after. She'd thought she'd miss being alive, but she wouldn't miss Harrow. Turned out, she'd been wrong on both counts.

She was about to thank Harrow for rescuing her from the Sixth's super secret medical facility when Harrow started snoring. Right, five days without sleep. Also, Harrow snored! Gideon was never going to let her forget that.

-

When Gideon woke up, she noticed a few things.

One: she was alive. Alive! Harrowhawk had jolted her out of her coma two days ago, but that wasn't the same as simply waking up, the natural rhythm of surfacing from sleep after a nice long rest. For one thing, she'd been drugged into that coma, and it had sucked ass.

Two: Harrow's snores had subsided into small sounds that were a combination of snorting, grumbling, and wheezing. It was weirdly charming. 

Three: Her lips were brushing the crown of Harrow's head, and Harrow hadn't washed her hair in a while, and Gideon still wouldn't have traded all the incense in Canaan House for the smell of Harrow's unwashed hair.

Four: Harrow's fingers had a bony death grip on Gideon's elbow and she couldn't move her right forearm. She also couldn't feel her left forearm, because Harrow was lying on that and cutting off her circulation. Being alive again meant she could be hurt and Gideon loved every minute of it.

She bent her head to kiss Harrow's shoulder. "Hey, spooky lady."

Harrow went from asleep to alert in a millisecond, stretching around to stare at Gideon, like she couldn't quite believe it either.

Gideon couldn't stop herself from smiling. Half of Harrow's greasepaint had come off on the pillow, and Gideon got to see her face underneath it, the cheekbone, the eyebrow, the curve of her nostril and the line of her lips. She liked Harrow's face. "Hi," she breathed.

Harrow's eyes took her in, and Gideon could feel a sense of warmth, and also--

Harrow was thinking about the girl in the Locked Tomb.

Gideon groaned and tried to roll away, but Harrow was still clutching at her elbow, and her little noodle arms had gotten surprisingly strong in the last six years.

"It's not what you think," said Harrow, releasing her and swinging her legs off the bed. Her feet were very long and pale and bony.

"It's okay," said Gideon. "You love an undead weirdo. I should have expected as much."

"Gideon," said Harrow, undoing her robes and letting them drop to the floor, "you _are_ an undead weirdo."

And with that, she went off to the attached bathroom and shut herself in the sonic shower and Gideon had to remember how to breathe because yes, she'd seen Harrowhawk naked before, but both of them had been in danger of dying at any moment. Now they were only in danger of Gideon making a fool herself, apparently. And getting caught or bombed by the Cohort.

She smoothed out her jumpsuit, still a little bummed it wasn't black. It wasn't like she'd ever been a huge fan of the robes and the lace and the veils of the Ninth, but she had grown up wearing black. Black felt right. And khaki just felt wrong.

Gideon remembered what Harrow had said last night about how many bedrooms were in this ball. The jumpsuits they'd taken for the skeletons had been olive green, but as far as Gideon was concerned that was still better than khaki. More Ninth than khaki. Kind of dark, at least. And maybe she'd luck out and one of the long-gone colonists would have been an individual.

She returned with a jumpsuit in what looked like her size to find a small mammal disemboweling another small mammal in the middle of their bed.

"What the fuck," she said, reaching for a sword that wasn't there. She missed her sword.

Harrow looked up from where she was reapplying her face. Gideon silently cursed herself for not sticking around to see her get out of the shower, her long straight eyelashes, her cheekbones, the dip between her nose and lips, her lips-- "Rats snuck aboard one of the colonists' supply ships. So they imported the domesticated feline."

The thing doing the murdering was at least twenty pounds, it was missing an ear, and it did not look domesticated in the least. "Lots of little death energy, then," Gideon said, and mentally kicked herself.

"It's like this little bubble," Harrow said. "No one imagined it would last this long." Her tone was wistful. "It makes me think of home."

It made Gideon think of the rats and the skeletons rattling around the snow leek fields, everyone else dead and decaying below, who was too hateful to die. They'd had rats on Drearburh. Gideon had always tried not to think about it, especially when there was fresh protein in the kitchen's stew instead of bean blocks or freeze-dried Third lab meat. "Yeah," she said, a lump in her throat. She'd spent so much time trying to get off planet and have adventures and she had for two weeks and then she'd _died_. Okay, maybe she hadn't exactly died, and in her dim coma she'd occasionally tapped in to all the fun Harrow was having and Harrow hadn't even appreciated the adventures. She'd taken down a fleet of space pirates! She'd helped the Emperor defeat an alien horde! And--

"Gideon," said Harrow, standing up abruptly. She hadn't finished the shadows around her nose and her mouth and she looked frankly ridiculous, but before Gideon could say anything about that, she wrapped her spindly little arms around Gideon's shoulders. "You're alive now. That's all that matters."

"Says you," said Gideon, huffing in her hair. "You weren't the one who was dead."

"I felt like I was," said Harrow.

Gideon didn't say _bully for you_ because of immense personal growth, and because she could feel it, she could feel what Harrow had been telling her in the pool all those years ago, the sense of being a black hole from which nothing could escape, and it was awful, feeling Harrow feel that. Maybe for the other Lyctors it was a relief when their cavaliers died: if they weren't careful, Gideon suspected, they could get lost in this echo chamber of emotion.

Or maybe the other Lyctors had been made from necromancers who were much, much better adjusted than Harrowhawk Nonagesimus. That was, Gideon reflected as she hugged Harrow like she'd never get the chance to do so again, extremely probable. She'd suspected Harrow was fucked up, as a child; she just hadn't known how fucked up.

"Harrow," she said, after a little while.

Harrow pulled back. There was white smeared all over Gideon's fresh new jumpsuit. "Yes?"

"Please don't bite me," said Gideon, and ducked down to kiss her.

Harrow did not bite her. Harrow stood skeleton stiff and Gideon could tell that she had no idea what was happening to her, and then she apparently must have picked up on Gideon's _I'm kissing you, dumbass_ , and she dug her fingers in like she was drowning and Gideon was the only thing keeping her afloat, and started to kiss her back.

Kissing wasn't like Gideon had imagined it. For one thing, she hadn't imagined it would taste like greasepaint. But she wasn't going to let anything like a faceful of makeup stop her from kissing Harrow once she'd started.

"Oh," said Harrow, when Gideon had to come up for air.

"If you want me to stop--" Gideon began.

Harrow grabbed Gideon's skull, and stared directly into her eyes. She was so close, and so intense, that Gideon found it hard not to look away. "Don't you dare stop."

Gideon swallowed. "Your wish is my command, my creepy mistress of the night."

"Fuck you," said Harrow.

"What did you think we were doing?" At least she hadn't put all her bones on again, Gideon thought, even as her heart was hammering. She put her hands on Harrow, and she thought she might die all over again. "Please tell me this isn't like the time I had to teach you how to jerk it."

Harrow flushed at that, but Gideon could feel how much that memory turned her on. "You were good at it."

"Practice makes perfect." But it'd been an entirely new body, and Gideon had been overwhelmed by it almost as much as Harrow. She remembered the sight of distant stars and galaxies outside Harrow's window on the spaceship, the noises Harrow had made, the sense of once again holding Harrow in her arms and knowing that they were one.

And then the stupid coma had dragged her back to her own body, not that she'd known it was a coma at the time. She'd simply been yanked back into darkness before she could bask in the afterglow.

She could bask in the afterglow today, Gideon realized. Sex in her own body was going to be great.

She leaned down and kissed the junction of neck and jaw, like she could feel Harrow's pulse hammering beneath the skin. It still tasted like greasepaint but Gideon didn't care. She'd have eaten an entire tub of greasepaint to get with Harrow, which was something she was really lucky Harrow had never figured out when they were still horrible teens on Drearburh together, because she'd have made her.

Gideon kissed Harrow's neck, her collarbone, her sternum through the black lace. Harrow's hands were resting lightly in Gideon's hair. It wasn't entirely that she didn't know what to do, Gideon caught, it was that she was scared that if she pushed too hard, the reality of this would scatter, and she'd wake up.

"Are you freaking kidding me," Gideon asked, getting to her knees so she could kiss down Harrow's bony ribs, "you always push too hard, and I'm still here, pushing right back."

Harrow's eyes fluttered. Her mouth opened. She clutched at Gideon's shoulders and said, "There's a Cohort ship firing on the decoy skeletons."

No. "Can't I just--"

"They've brought it down," she continued. "They're bringing it back."

Gideon slipped her hands down to Harrow's hips and put her nose right up against the lace. She could hear Harrow's breath hitch. She'd been waiting for this for--

"Being bombed by the Cohort, or dragged out of here by the Cohort and being imprisoned separately until the Emperor comes back to mete out justice, would also ruin the mood, Nav," Harrow said. Her voice almost hid how much she wanted Gideon to pick her up and take her back to bed regardless.

"Fine, fine." Gideon got back to her feet. "Duty calls, then booty calls."

Harrow didn't dignify that with an answer.

-

The Second pilot was super dead. He was still in the cockpit when the horde of skeletons came back with the plane on their shoulders.

"Uh," said Gideon. The skeletons dumped it on the ground and trooped off. 

"The first plane," Harrow reminded her, and Gideon got it. Harrow was going to salvage all three for parts and combine them into one living ship, like in the pre-Resurrection holy texts, the Old and the Young Frankensteins.

Gideon decided then and there that she was going to help. If for nothing else, then for the chance to lift giant metal plates like they were nothing because god bless one-sixth g.

"Thank you," said Harrow quietly as Gideon hauled off part of the ship so she could inspect the engine. The other skeletons were coming back, the first downed ship held aloft by a forest of radii and ulnae.

"Do you know how these actually work?" asked Gideon, suppressing the urge to kick at the engine, since that would probably just make it explode.

Harrow bit her lip. She hadn't reapplied her face paint, and Gideon could feel how much that bothered her. "The dead pilots are here."

Oh. Oh. Also, maybe Harrow could finally learn how to fly a ship--

"Fuck you, Nav," she said.

"Hey, I was trying, but then the skeletons came back," Gideon said, and she got to watch Harrow blush. Technically, she'd been inside Harrow before, but seeing her face, feeling her equal parts horny and embarrassed, it was just-- "Let's get this ship fixed and then destroy its bed."

"Gideon," said Harrow, "I need to concentrate."

Which was fine. Which was great. Only Gideon could tell she was still thinking about what had happened that morning, so Gideon was thinking about it, too, so--oh, the first downed pilot had called in their location and there might be more Fleet ships on the way.

Gideon got to shifting more metal, fast.

In the end, the ship she and Harrow managed to build out of the components of the three didn't look like a shambling monster. They'd ripped some of the tracking and communications equipment out of the Cohort ship, taken the ancient stuff from the moon's shuttle, and raided food and medical supplies from the first downed Cohort ship, plus more berries from the dome. "Do we have everything?" Gideon asked.

Harrow, who'd gone back for her greasepaint, paused on the ramp.

"We are not taking the dead pilots with us," Gideon told her.

"We can't leave them here," said Harrow. "The moon's ecosystems--"

Gideon could feel it, then, that that wasn't the objection. "The rest of the Cohort will be along anyway, they'll do all the proper funerary rites, and we're in enough trouble with the Empire without stealing their corpses."

"What if--"

"We're leaving them, your creepiness. I promise I'll accept full responsibility if you crash again because I won't let you have a dead copilot."

"I am not going to crash again," said Harrow, and sniffed, and swept up the ramp.

Gideon turned to get one last glimpse of the geodesic dome, bounced one last time to enjoy the low g, and followed her.

-

It was weird, watching the moon grow smaller, and smaller, until they could see the blue marble of the First emerging from behind it. The sight sent a shiver through Gideon. She'd died there, or almost died, anyway. She'd seen good people die terrible deaths there, and a few pretty awful people too.

"Hey," Gideon said, turning to Harrow, who was watching too, "where do we go from here?"

Harrow glanced from the window to Gideon's face, and worried her lower lip between her teeth. "I believe you made some promises about the ship's bed," she said, finally.

Warmth spread through Gideon's chest, up her neck, and into her face. First House what? "Okay," she said, when she realized that Harrow was still waiting for an answer and might bite through her own lip if Gideon took any longer.

-

"So," said Gideon, resting her head on Harrow's bony chest. There had been no alarms, no attacks, nothing to suggest they were being pursued.

"I gave the Cohort's comms equipment to the feral cats," Harrow told her. "That should throw them off for a while."

"And after that?" Gideon twisted around. "I mean, I know the Emperor will be angry that you bailed on your assignment and stormed the Sixth House, but he can't stay annoyed at you forever. You're still a Lyctor, and he doesn't have many of those left." She remembered the sword, sliding through porcelain-pale skin. Large blue eyes, not particularly surprised or sad, just--tired. At the time she'd been so focused on keeping Harrowhawk alive that she hadn't really stopped to think about what Lyctorhood could mean in the long run, but Harrow was pretty crazy to begin with.

"We're not going back," said Harrow, and, okay, wow, Harrow was much crazier than Gideon had thought.

"From what I remember of being in your head, you were really good at being a Lyctor. You liked it. You--"

"Found out you were _alive_ , Nav," said Harrow, all dark-eyed intensity, and not the fun banging in bed kind. "Found out that you were alive, and that you don't die, and that the Sixth were _documenting_ it. This entire empire is built on death. The Emperor has power over everything that can die, and you can't. I think it best that he doesn't learn about, and that you don't go anywhere near him, or anywhere where he can touch you."

She was speaking calmly, but her heart was wild, her sense of fear, of stress, palpable through their bond. It had been like that on her way to the Sixth, Gideon realized, and only dissolved into a great relief when she'd stormed the medical facility, broken into Gideon's room, and raised her from the induced coma. She was getting a fuller picture of it now, why Harrow had been so hellbent on springing her, and why she hadn't slept in several days, although somehow she'd found the time to apply her face paint painstakingly.

Gideon kissed Harrow's skin now, hoping that would calm her. "Yeah, but you just established that he can't kill me, that nothing can kill me."

Harrow sighed. Her hands buried themselves in Gideon's hair like it was either that or strangle her. "Nav, why do you think the girl in the locked tomb is _in_ the locked tomb?"

Oh. Oh. "He'd send me back to _Drearburh_?"

"That wasn't exactly my point," said Harrow. "Maybe he'd imprison you on a moon, since you love them so much."

"Still better than Drearburh," Gideon muttered.

Harrow groaned and flopped her head back down onto what passed for the ship's pillow.

"Hey." Gideon wriggled out of her hold, and up to wrap her arms around Harrow. "Thank you. For saving me from a fate worse than Drearburh. I am truly honored to be an outlaw with you. You are definitely at the top of my galaxy's most wanted list."

"I am going to punch you in the kidneys if you tell me about a dirty magazine story you read that was like this," Harrow said, her eyes firmly shut, but a bit of a smile playing around her thin mouth anyway.

Gideon kissed her. It was a hazard Harrow was going to have to accept: whenever she didn't wear face paint, Gideon was going to kiss her dumb pointy face everywhere she could. She was probably going to kiss Harrow when Harrow was in full makeup, since she couldn't get poisoned to death by it. She was--

There was a flash of movement in the doorway, and Gideon tensed, ready to throw herself on any threat to Harrow. Instead, the moon cat met her glance.

Gideon dropped her head to Harrow's collarbone. "We have a stowaway."

"Yes," said Harrow. "I couldn't spare the time to chase it out when the Cohort might have been on us at any second."

She had literal armies of skeletons at her command. "And you think it's cute."

"It brings death and destruction wherever it goes."

Gideon poked her in the side. Harrow grabbed her hand and twisted. "As I said, cute." She used her other hand to tuck Harrow's head into the crook of her neck. "It's okay," she said. "I get it. You were lonely for a long time, and the cat doesn't talk back to you."

"You really don't know much about cats," Harrow said, her voice muffled against Gideon's skin.

Gideon curled herself around Harrow. "It'll be okay," she said. "Crazier things have happened. For example, I like--" She stopped, swallowed. "I love you."

"And I love you," said Harrow, voice even more muffled. 

"But that was bound to happen," said Gideon. "What with me being an undead weirdo, and all that."

Harrow punched her in the ribs this time, smiling against Gideon's skin. They were going to be just fine.


End file.
